Giving Up the Ghost (4 page)

“Can you determine his location from what you hear?” McCarty asked.

“That's the thing,” Mackie said. “The key is
sending,
it's not receiving. The message is originating from here, at that desk, yet there is no finger visible upon the key.”

“So, it's haunted,” Earp said. His face was unusually pale.

“Let's not jump to conclusions,” McCarty said. “There may be some reasonable explanation that we've overlooked. What we need is to make a list, and think of all the possible causes for the key to act in such a manner, and systemically check them off the list. Ah, there's a pad of paper and a pencil over there on the counter. Would you mind handing it to me, Mr. Mackie?”

“There's a simpler way to check this out,” Earp said.

“Oh?” McCarty asked.

Earp drew a heavy knife and placed the blade down on the insulated wires at the back of the telegraph key. Then he made a fist with his other hand and brought it down sharply on the knife, severing the leads. The blue flame entered the knife and swirled up Earp's wrist. He jumped back as if he had been bitten by a rattlesnake, and shook his hand so violently the knife flew out and clattered on the floor.

But the unearthly flame flared and vanished.

“Did it hurt?” I asked.

“No,” he said, retrieving his knife. “It surprised me. Felt prickly is all.”

The key was silent now.

“May I?” I asked, reaching my hand toward the key.

“Go ahead,” Mackie said.

I picked up the instrument, which was surprisingly heavy. I looked at the hump-shaped lever, and the flat button on the end, and the spring beneath and the adjustment screws. On the side of the lever, neatly stamped into the brass, was the legend: “
AVAIL SPEEDWELL
.”

The key continued to tap out its message.

“It's detached,” Earp said. “Should it still be doing that?”

“It's completely removed from the circuits,” Mackie said, fear making his voice tremble. “It shouldn't be doing anything, much less sending at thirty words a minute. Please, Miss Wylde, could you take the key with you when you go? I don't want it here in the office with me.”

“Don't blame you,” Earp said.

The other messages were still rocking the sounder.

Then the wireless key stopped for several seconds, and then began again, but with a different message, at a slower pace.

“Wait,” Mackie said. “That's one fist I recognize.”

He picked up the pad and pencil and began to copy.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Hopkins,” he said, continuing to copy the message even as he talked. “He was the operator at Florence, in Marion County, about four hours down the tracks to the east. But it can't be.”

When Mackie stopped writing, he had a queer look on his face.

“What's it say?” Earp asked.

Mackie handed over the pad, and I leaned close to Earp's shoulder to read the message:

 

I AM MURDERED!

“Murdered,” Earp said, regarding the telegraph key with suspicion. “He's being murdered and has the time to send a message?”

“No,” Mackie said. “Hopkins—or Hapless Hopkins, as everyone called him, because he was the unluckiest operator to ever touch a key—collapsed and died a week ago this Sunday, after eating his dinner. It was assumed his heart failed him.”

“Hopkins seems to think otherwise,” I said.

“Were you and this Hopkins friends?” Earp asked.

“Yes,” he said. “The key is his, in fact; it was his personal key, the one he was using the night he died, and his friends thought he would have wanted me to have it. It is old, and quite a fine key, although I've never seen another one exactly like it. The name of the manufacturer is stamped in the brass,
SPEEDWELL
, but it is a concern I've never heard of.”

“A mystery,” McCarty said, smiling.

“When is the next train to Florence?” I asked.

“The eastbound combination, the
Ginery Twitchell
,” Mackie said.

“I'd like to be on it,” I said.

“Don't be silly,” Earp said. “You don't even have a client.”

“Whenever there's a murder accompanied by messages from the grave, I'm guessing I can find a client.”

“You might not be going anywhere anytime soon,” Mackie said. “With all this nonsense on the circuit, I don't know if it's on time or hopelessly delayed. I have no way to receive updates from the dispatcher, or to send reports of my own. This intelligence is necessary to put a train on a siding to allow another to pass; otherwise, collisions are assured on a single-track railway.”

“What's the chance this phenomenon is only manifesting at this depot?” McCarty asked.

“The circuit is common,” Mackie said. “If it's happening here, it's happening everywhere, and if it lasts for more than a few minutes, it will bring the Santa Fe to its knees. The timetable is king. The railway runs on the clock and the telegraph; without the latter, the entire line is in confusion, and lives are in jeopardy.”

“Perhaps things will settle before the train arrives,” McCarty said.

“And if they don't?” Earp asked.

Mackie pursed his lips.

The
Ginery Twitchell
was scheduled to arrive at seven, he said, and then wait on a siding for the westbound freight to pass ten minutes later. It wouldn't take much of a deviation from the schedule on the part of either train for things to end in disaster.

“Is there anyway to stop them?”

“I can lower the ball,” he said, referring to the bright red ball on the mast outside. “Low ball means stop at the station, but it's night and the westbound freight will be expecting to highball it through and may not be able to stop in time, if it meets the combination.”

“Then we'll have to flag them down well before they near the station,” McCarty said. “Mackie, you stay here in case the lines clear. The rest of us will flag down the trains.”

Mackie broke out a pair of railway lanterns, checked that each had oil, and lit them. He gave one lantern to McCarty and offered the other to Earp, who hesitated.

“There is business I must attend to.”

“Oh, for God's sake,” I said, and took the lantern. The globe was oddly shaped, like an elongated pumpkin, but clear red, and encased in a kind of bird cage affair to protect the glass.

“You go west, Ophelia,” McCarty said, already on his way out the door. “I'll head east.”

“What do I do with it?” I asked.

“Just swing it in front of you,” Mackie said. “The engineer will see it.”

I left the station, hurried down the platform, and set off down the railway tracks in the direction of Colorado. The lantern threw enough light from the bottom to allow me to see where I was stepping, but I still had to be careful, because the spaces between the ties were full of loose stones, cinders, and the occasional plate or spike. But soon I fell into a rhythm of stepping from one tie to the next, and followed the tracks into the dark and seemingly endless prairie. The wire stretched over the telegraph poles was still glowing and giving off an occasional shower of sparks, but not as energetically as before.

The eastbound must have been late, because I know I'd walked for more than ten minutes without seeing anything at the end of the track.

It felt more than a bit odd to be alone at night carrying a red lantern down the center of a pair of railway tracks, and I briefly pondered whether there might be any wolves or panthers or two-legged killers watching my passage, from among the shadows in the tall grass. The thought made me feel slightly silly—could I really be frightened so easily?—but then I heard footsteps on the roadbed behind me.

My heart skipped three beats.

“Ophelia.”

It was Earp.

“Stop for a moment,” he said.

I had to catch my breath before I could speak.

“Were you trying to frighten me on purpose?” I asked.

“Why would I do that?”

“Only you would know,” I said.

“Well, I wasn't trying to scare you,” he said. “I was coming after to say you'd gone far enough. If it were daylight, you'd see that we're at the top of a low hill, and there's a clear line of sight down the tracks for a couple of miles.”

“I thought you had some errand to run,” I said.

“I said I had something to attend to,” he said. “It took only a moment.”

I placed the lantern down on a tie between us. It bathed our legs in a strange red glow.

“What could be so important when catastrophe is in the air?”

“A friend was in desperate need,” he said.

“The dentist?” I asked.

Not long after Earp had returned from Texas, a sometime dentist and full-time gambler and consumptive named Doc Holliday arrived in Dodge. He and Earp had met at Fort Griffin and had apparently been fast friends from the start.

“Yes, Holliday. He has suffered rather badly today, and I was bringing him a box of Dr. Pierce's Pleasant Pellets to provide some relief. It took only a moment to deliver the box, and only two people were needed to propel the lanterns.”

“The prime ingredient in Dr. Pierce's pellets is the poppy,” I said. “You are doing your friend no favors.”

“You have not witnessed his suffering.”

“I did not think opium was an anodyne typically prescribed for consumption.”

“He has other ills,” Earp said, wounded at my lack of sympathy for his new friend.

“Don't we all,” I said.

“Look,” Earp said, nodding down the track.

A pinpoint of light had appeared.

“Better get to signaling,” Earp said. “At their speed, they will be upon us in three or four minutes.”

I picked up the lantern and began to move it, at waist level, stiffly from side to side.

“No,” Earp said, stepping close to me. “You've got to swing it.”

He closed his hands over mine and pushed the lantern down to my knees. I could feel his chest pressing against my back, but before I could decide if it was a pleasant feeling or not, he was giving me instructions. “Now, let it swing natural, like a pendulum, and slow. Yes, that's it.”

The lamp made a wide and low red arc.

“Why do you avoid me?” he asked.

His breath was coffee and cigar smoke.

“This is hardly the time,” I said.

“Your disapproval is obvious.”

“I hardly know you,” I said. “Besides, it is you who has no affection for me.”

“You are mistaken,” he said. “I am strangely attracted.”

“It was never my ambition to be a strange attractor.”

“By strangely, I meant—”

I decided the closeness was unpleasant.

“Marshal Earp,” I said, breaking away. “You are married.”

Well, that was overstating the case somewhat. He had a common-law wife named Mattie whom he had met in a brothel back in Wichita, as I understood it, and she had continued her career. It was not an unusual arrangement on the frontier, but one that I found distasteful. In my former life, it wouldn't have caused me a second's thought, but since assuming my new straight life, I had gotten downright puritanical about such things.

“It is a temporary arrangement,” he said.

“Perhaps, but you are nonetheless occupied,” I said. “Please, let us attend to the business at hand. We can parse our grotesque affections later.”

The light down the track had grown closer and we could hear the chugging sound of the engine, and feel the vibration transmitted by the rails to the track bed. I kept lazily swinging the lamp, hoping the engineer was alert and watching the track ahead and would not run over me and slice me into a thousand strips of uncanny jerky.

“It doesn't seem to be slowing,” I said.

“It takes them a long time to stop,” Earp said. “If you listen carefully, you can hear the beat of the rods slowing. There, now we can hear the protests of the jostling cars as the air brakes are applied.”

“Yes, I hear it now.”

I kept swinging the lantern.

The train's progress became a crawl. When it was within a hundred yards, I was illuminated by the headlight, and could feel the size and immensity of the locomotive behind it.

The
Ginery Twitchell
was a beast, with two drive wheels taller than I was on each side, and a cab behind the boiler that seemed like a small house. The engineer was leaning far out from the lofty window of the cab, trying to see as much ahead of him as possible, uncertain as to why he was being flagged down.

Earp grasped my arm and pulled me off the tracks as the
Ginery Twitchell
came to a tortured metallic halt a few yards from us, then hissed and belched steam.

“What's the trouble?” the engineer called.

“The telegraph is down,” Earp said, taking hold of a grab iron and pulling himself up the steps that led to the cab.

“Hell, that ain't nothing,” the engineer said, and spat tobacco juice to the ground twelve feet below. “The telegraph is always down somewhere. The crudding Cheyenne cut the wires two or three weeks ago about twenty miles west and it took—”

Earp drew his revolver and fired a round into the air.

“You make me want to punch you in the throat,” he said. “Shut up and listen. The entire railway telegraph network, from Topeka to New Mexico, may be inoperable. The station agent sent us out to flag you down and keep you from colliding with the westbound freight.”

The engineer pulled a twist of tobacco from his pocket and sliced off a bit with his pocket knife. His eyes, however, were fixed on the gun in Earp's hand.

“Don't come any closer to the cab,” he said.

“Why?'

“Because your story stinks like a wet dog,” the engineer said, slipping the chunk of tobacco into his mouth. “And because I've got a ten-gauge shotgun here in the cab and I'm not shy about using it. Holster that sidearm and let us pass.”

“You believe we're here to rob you?”

“Somebody flagging down a train at night is never up to any good.”

“My name's Wyatt Earp and I'm a Dodge City marshal.”

“Never heard of you.”

The engineer pushed a lever and the train lurched forward, shaking the slack out of the line of cars behind. A series of metal thunderclaps shook the prairie.

Earp swore.

“Holster that weapon,” I said.

As the locomotive's huge drive wheels began to roll, I approached the cab with my hands visible, both hands on the bale of the lantern.

“Please,” I shouted. “You must stop.”

“Who are you?”

“A friend,” I said.

“You could be a member of the James Gang, for all I know.”

“I'm Ophelia Wylde and I'm a resident of Dodge City and a tax-paying business owner and I know the man at the depot at Dodge is named Mackie and that his friend, Hopkins, of the fraternity of railway telegraphers, died unexpectedly in Marion County.”

“Step back,” the engineer growled.

“Fils de salope,”
I swore.
Sonuvabitch
.

I kicked the ground, scattering rocks toward the hulking locomotive and its pigheaded engineer. Anger clouded my brain so that I could no longer form a coherent sentence in English, but I had no trouble issuing a melodious string of French Creole curses.

Then a voice rang in the center of my mind, hard and clear and right.

“Winnie tells you to stop,” I shouted.

The engineer jammed another lever forward and the locomotive lost its momentum.

“What did you say?”

“Winnifred says to stop,” she said. “She's telling me that if you don't, you're not only going to kill yourself, but your fireman will die too, and some of your passengers. Winnie tells me to remind you of what happened in Plymouth.”

The engineer applied the air brakes and the train came to a complete stop.

“What do you know of Plymouth?”

“Nothing,” I said. “But Winnie does.”

“I was nearly killed at Plymouth, in Lyon County, when a fool pulled a pin on a freight car and it nearly crushed me against a track bumper. It was during a thunderstorm, it was raining snakes and frogs, and I didn't hear the car rolling toward me—but I heard Winnie's voice telling me to get out of the way.”

In the glare from the firebox, I could see the lines in the engineer's face, the deep-set and sad eyes, the mustache stained with tobacco juice.